DR. MARK HINDERS

Mark Hinders holds BS, MS and PhD in Aerospace and
Mechanical Engineering from Boston University,
and is currently Professor of Applied Science at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Before
coming to Williamsburg in 1993, Professor
Hinders was Senior Scientist at Massachusetts Technological Laboratory, Inc.,
and also Research Assistant Professor at BostonUniversity.
Before that Dr. Hinders was an Electromagnetics Research
Engineer at the USAF Rome Laboratory located
at Hanscom AFB, MA. Professor Hinders conducts
research in wave propagation and scattering phenomena, applied to medical
imaging, intelligent robotics, security screening, remote sensing and
nondestructive evaluation. He and his students study the interaction of
acoustic, ultrasonic, elastic, thermal, electromagnetic and optical waves with
materials, tissues and structures. Youtube videos of
Prof. Hinders are here
and here or if you
prefer Linkedin, Prof. Hinders can be found here.

•Medical
Diagnostics: Ultrasound images, mammograms, etc. are two-dimensional
“cuts” of three-dimensional anatomy. Doctors are expert at
interpreting them, but the diagnosis is still quite subjective.

•Structural
Flaw Detection: Technicians are not as highly trained at diagnosis, plus
there is no standard “anatomy” and the structure can’t tell
where it hurts. There’s also the morning after bowling night!

•On-line
Inspection: Engineers don’t want to interpret images.They want the instrumentation to give a
green light if the process is OK, and a red light if it’s out of
spec.

•Intelligent
Robotics: The key to useful robots is a combination of imaging sensors and
the on-board intelligence to interpret them. Want to tell the robot to turn
left at the big tree, not feed it GPS coordinates.

The focus of our work is to implement new and better
measurements with both novel instrumentation and artificial intelligence that
automates the interpretation of the various (and multiple) imaging data
streams. Each student’s
research typically has application to several seemingly quite different
areas, in order to gain meaningful experience in multiple industries. Our
graduates have gone on to work in a wide variety of jobs, and many of our
current research projects are being done in close collaboration with our former
students: